Commentary on Political Economy

Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Max Weber's Transition to the Leitender Geist

This is another extract from the review of Max Weber's political sociology that I am conducting at present. It is a difficult piece. But it will repay close study because here is contained the thematic analysis of the "crisis" that European capital is experiencing right now with the co-option of "technocratic governments" in Italy and Greece at the behest of Franco-German Finanzkapital! Max Weber, as you can read here, would turn in his grave - or rather, "could not help smiling at the anxiety" of these pathetic bourgeois!

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Assuming that precisely
this possibility were to be an inescapable fate who

could help smiling at the
anxiety of our litterateurs lest future social and political

developments might bestow
on us too much 'individualism' or ‘democracy' or

the like or that 'true
freedom’ would not emerge until the present

‘anarchy' in our economic
production and the ‘party machinations'

in our parliaments had
been eliminated in favour of ‘social order’ and

an ‘organic structure’ -
which means in favor of the pacifism of

social impotence under the
wing of the one quite definitely inescapable

power, that of the
bureaucracy in the state and the economy?(169)

The laughable
incomprehension of “the nature of the matter” by the literati, the
decadent liberal intelligentsia (an orientation that persists to the
present day!), is to believe that the capitalist economy is “anarchical” and
that parliamentary politics is “Machiavellian” – that the problem that besets
society is “too much individualism” or “democracy”, and that only “social
order” will restore “true freedom”. Yet it is precisely this “yearning” for a
lost paradise of “true freedom” – the Schumpeterian Individualitat of
the “entrepreneurial spirit” (Freedom) reconciled with the “scientific
rationality of Economics” (Truth) -, this unwillingness to grapple with the
“anarchy” of capitalism and the “machinations” of politics that constitutes
“the pacifism of social impotence” (the Nietzschean Ohn-Macht),
it is the unwillingness to tackle the “inescapable fate” of conflict that will
condemn us to “one definitely inescapable power, that of the bureaucracy in the
state and the economy”!

Weber gives ample
proof in this passage of how well he has understood Nietzsche’s pitiless
“de-struktion” of the Vollendung, the “com-pletion” of Western values in
morality, science and philosophy. Schumpeter’s vain attempt to reconcile the Individualitat
of the Unternehmergeist with the “scientificity” of the Economics is
definitely “overcome”. Not only is it not possible to retain any “scientific”
analysis of the Economy that can “quantify” its “conflict” and reduce it to the
“rational individual choice” of the market; not only can there be no
“development” of the capitalist economy due to the “subjectivity” of the
entrepreneur because “development” originates from a “system of needs and
wants” that curtails and conditions any “subjectivity”; but it is also the
very conflict over the provision for needs and wants “liberated” by capitalism
with the formation of “free labor” organized as a class that now finally subsumes
“scientific activity” itself to that conflict by means of the “rational
organization of free labor”.

In other words, far
from being the outcome of the unstoppable expansion of the sphere of “empirical
science” to the realm of social life and of the Economics in particular, the Rationalisierung
theorized by Nietzsche (philosophically) and Weber (sociologically) engenders
the subsumption of the scientific process to the explosive, uncontainable conflict
and antagonism between “the system of needs and wants” aimed at “the care
for external goods” (“the iron cage”) and the ability of the capitalist mode of
production “to guide and govern” it through a program of“development and growth” that “preserves and
reproduces” the existing capitalist social relations of production. Any rational
evaluation of capitalism in the sense of “empirical science” as understood by
Schumpeter in the Theorie and by the Economics is therefore quite
impossible! Scientific rationality itself is now subsumed to the conflict that
capitalism generates as a motor of its own development. It is this “triptych”
of the relationship between social conflict from the democratization of
“labor”, its rational and scientific organization in the direction of
“capitalist development”, and the “political governance” needed to mediate the
effects of “growth-through-crisis” that concerns Weber in the all-important
period between 1917 and 1919 and that covers the lectures on Politik als
Beruf and Wissenschaft als Beruf and then the series of papers on Parlament
und Regierung.

It is the very
“freedom” of “labor” that allows workers to organize as a class and that
permits therefore the “organization” of conflict in a “rational” manner by “the
living machine” of private capitalist and state bureaucracy, that is to say,
“under the regular discipline of the factory”, - of the factory as “lifeless
machine” with its “congealed spirit” of “the system of wants and needs”! The
“lifeless machine” of capitalist production possesses a “congealed spirit”, and
the “machinery of bureaucracy” is a “living machine” that stands “in the
closest relation” to both capitalist “enterprise” and “state administration”.
No “rationality” is possible without the “free” expression of social
antagonism over the wage relation. The reality of Western “economy and society”
– against Schumpeter’s misunderstanding of Weber’s Rationalisierung
as “empirical science” replacing the “teleological rationality” of
“metaphysics”, against Werner Sombart’s interpretation of “modern
capitalism” as “rationality”, soon to be repudiated by Weber in the Vorbermerkungen
of 1920 – is that capitalism is “the rational organization” of “free
labor”!

Indeed, it would
not even be possible to speak of “true freedom”, of Individualitat, of
individualism and democracy and “the Rights of Man” without the imponent push
of the “conflict” that capitalism has “organized under the regular discipline
of the factory”. “It is a piece of cruel self-deception to think that even the
most conservative amongst us”, even those of us most opposed to “freedom and
democracy”, “could carry on living at all today without these achievements from
the age of the ‘Rights of Man’”, that is, the American and French Revolutions
and the Enlightenment, which have led through the “liberation of labor”,
through “free labor” and its “autonomous market demand” to the kind of
“rational organization of free labor”, of social conflict and antagonism represented
by the “all-powerful trend toward bureaucratization” – that is to say, the
“provision” of “the most basic needs and wants of social life”, to the
“socialization” that is the necessary pre-condition of bureaucracy.

It is vital to
discern how Weber traces a strict link between “freedom and democracy”, and
therefore the Demokratisierung, through to the “liberation” of “labor”, its
constitution “as a class” that can press its “autonomous market demands” in
terms of “the care for external goods”, of its “needs and wants” – all the way
to the Vergesellschaftung, the “socialization” of these conflicting needs and
wants as a result of the need for capital “rationally to organize this free
labor” in the pursuit of “rationally calculable profit” (in opposition
to the Gemeinschaft theorized by Tonnies as an echo to Kant’s “ungesellige
Geselligkeit”) – that is, of its own “private” form of bureaucratization to
which the State bureaucracy is “most closely related”. Once again here Weber
retraces the conceptual Schematismus of the Neo-Kantian “sociological
Forms” theorized by Simmel, distinct from their “content” not in terms of “historical-materialist
experience” but only in terms of “durability” (the “Forms” being Kantian “concepts”
or “categories” that have epistemological and scientific validity whilst the “content”
is purely variable and “contingent”). The same distinction applies to
Rationalisierung and to “bureaucratization”. Not until the Vorbermerkungen will
Weber seek to deal coherently with these matters.

In view of the fundamental
fact that the advance of bureaucratisation

is unstoppable, there is
only one possible set of questions to be

asked about future forms
of political organisation: (1) how is it at all

possible to salvage any
remnants of 'individual' freedom of movement

in any sense given this
all-powerful trend towards bureaucratisation?

It is, after all, a piece
of cruel self-deception to think that even the

most conservative amongst
us could carry on living at all today without

these achievements from
the age of the 'Rights of Man'. However,

let us put this question
to one side for now, for there is another

which is directly relevant
to our present concerns: (2) In view of the

growing indispensability
and hence increasing power of state officialdom,

which is our concern here,
how can there be any guarantee

that forces exist which
can impose limits on the enormous, crushing

power of this constantly
growing stratum of society and control it

effectively? How is
democracy even in this restricted sense to be at all possible? (169)

Therefore, “in view
of the “growing indispensability
and hence increasing power of state officialdom [bureaucracy]” that
has been brought about by this growing “socialization”, the second question is
“what limits” can be imposed on this “enormous, crushing power” so as to be
able – and this is the first question - “to salvage any remnants of
‘individual’ freedom of movement in any
sense at all”! These two questions have to do crucially with “the
future forms of political organization”. The attempt “to control growth”
in such a manner that the explosive push of the system of needs and wants and
its ineluctable “conflict” can be mustered and then channeled into the
preservation and reproduction of existing capitalist social relations of
production – the profit motive – engenders an “increasing power of State
bureaucracy”, a “growth of control”, that becomes inexorably more
“indispensable” in terms of gauging and monitoring the “rationally calculable”
functioning of the “system” – both the “needs and wants” and the “profit
motive” -, but at the same time grows ever less capable to decide
“legitimately” the “direction” of the “system”! The “control of growth”
required for the preservation of existing relations of production – the
“rational conduct of capitalist business” - engenders a “growth of control”
designed “to maintain” these relations of production that tends to stifle and
smother the very “conflict” that “the system of needs and wants” rationally
organized as “free labor” with an “autonomous market demand” inevitably and
irrepressibly generates. The result is exactly the same as Weber had
apprehended for “rational Socialism”. The living machine cannot exorcise the “congealed spirit” of the lifeless machine: - only the “leading
Spirit” can guide and govern it.

Yet this too is not the
only question of concern to us

here, for there is (3) a
third question, the most important of all, which

arises from any
consideration of what is not performed by bureaucracy

as such. It is clear that
its effectiveness has strict internal limits,

both in the management of
public, political affairs and in the private

economic sphere. The leading spirit, the
‘entrepreneur’ in the one

case, the politician in
the other, is something different from an

‘official’. Not
necessarily in form, but certainly in substance. The

entrepreneur, too, sits in
an 'office'. An army commander does the

same.(170)…In the sphere of the

state the same applies to the leading politician. The
leading minister

is formally an official
with a pensionable salary.

This is the Organisationsfrage
for Weber, the point at which the Problematik of rational Socialism coincides
with that of capitalism: how can the present conflict-ridden “system of needs
and wants” – the congealed spirit of the lifeless machine – which under
capitalism takes institutional shape as the “rational organization of free labor as a class” that is
represented by the social democratic workers’ parties of the whole of Europe be
reconciled with that “rationality”? If indeed the “system” is founded on an
irrational “iron cage” of “care for external goods”, how can its irrational
conflict, its needs and wants, its “freedom”, be reconciled with the “rational
conduct of capitalist business” for “profitability”, its “science”? Indeed, how
is it at all possible “to conduct business for profitability” rationally
when the “system of needs and wants” expressed through the “autonomous market
demand” of “free labor” is not itself rational? This is the point at which the
“content” of the presumed “rationality” of the overall “system of capitalist
production” must be enucleated, discovered and explained. And the content
itself cannot be rational merely in the sense of “calculable”. Either we
find a “substantive rationality” or else Weber’s Rationalisierung is
sheer “mechanical violence” whose “increasing power”, its “growing control”
stands in the way of, obtrudes and represses, those “most basic needs of social
life”, those “needs and wants” that make it “indispensable”!

This is where the “effectiveness [of bureaucracy, state and capitalist] has
strict internal limits, both in the management of public, political affairs and
in the private economic sphere” in that there are things that “are not
performed by bureaucracy”!The
bureaucracy can only measure and monitor and perhaps even “repair” the existing
“system”. But it cannot determine either the modalities of its own “growth” nor
those of the “system” whose operation it is supposed to measure and monitor:
its “growing power” grows the more oppressive and repressive the more it
requires the “responsibility of the leitender Geist”. The leitender Geist
can only become the ultimate safety-valve of “the system” by assuming the
“responsibility” for the “decisions” that must be made to guide and govern and
direct “the system”. The “leader” is the expression of a particular, specific,
historical institutional expression of the conflict and antagonism of the
capitalist “rational organization of free labor under the regular discipline of
the factory”. The leader is the culmination of social antagonism and its
ultimate “legitimacy”.

This shows yet
again how deficient was Schumpeter’s attempt to explain the phenomenon of
capitalist “development” purely in terms of the subjective Individualitat
of the entrepreneur able to trans-form the “wants and provisions” of capitalist
society, rather than in terms of the “conflict” intrinsic to these “wants and
provisions” and its “rational organization”! The leader is not “different” or
“separate” from the bureaucratic machine: the leader represents merely the
“moment of decision”, the function of responsibility” for the entire “system”.
But the concentration of legitimacy in the “figure” of the “leader” serves
merely to display “disastrously”, “catastrophically” the inability of the
living machine of bureaucracy to live up to its “indispensability”. As the
legitimacy of the leitender Geist declines so does the “effectuality” of the
State administration – and so does the “systematic risk” of the entire system
grow.

The Parlamentarisierung
is supposed to facilitate and allow the “control of the controllers” (Cicero’s paradox – quis
custodiet ipsos custodes?”) so as to preserve “the autonomy of market demand”
and “the remnants of ‘individual’ freedom of expression in any sense at all”.
But this presupposes that (a) the “conflict” inherent to “the iron cage” is
itself inescapable – a “fate”; (b) that “the growth of control” is occasioned
blindly and irrationally by “the system of needs and wants” – that there are no
other reasons outside of “the iron cage” for the “socialization” of production
and the increasing power of bureaucracy; and (c) that the very possibility of
“governance” under capitalism through the Parlamentarisierung does not
itself allow for an alternative form of “governance” that, apart from the “leitender
Geist” and its responsibility for decisions, cannot resolve the conflict
between wants and provision – a conflict that, far from being “an inescapable
fate”, Weber himself had traced back to its “historical origins”! The question
of “the alternative” must then be posed.

In other words, is
there not an “inter esse” that is finally expressed, however distortedly, by
the “growth of control” engendered by the “need” to control growth? Is the
growth of control not itself the pro-duct of that need to control growth within
the bounds set by the capitalist “rationality” of “profitability”? And does
this “rationality”, this “profitability” not rest on the “rational organization
of free labor under the discipline of the factory” – and not on “autonomous
market demand”?

Clearly the problem
here is that Weber’s “iron cage” itself needs to be revisited, its
“inescapability” questioned, its “creation and maintenance” by “the spirit of
capitalism” traced to its historical origins. Above all else, the very possibility
of “conducting capitalist business for rational and systematicprofitability”,
through “the rational organization of free labor under the regular discipline
of the factory” needs to be examined.